Garth

Asperger's Syndrome is a form of high-functioning autism consisting of difficulty picking up on social cues, which sometimes results in sufferers acting inappropriately.

Assburgers Syndrome is a form of low-brainpower douchebaggery consisting of 15-year-olds on the Internet finding out about Asperger's Syndrome and thinking "Aha! I like acting inappropriately, therefore I must have Asperger's, therefore I have a Condition, therefore I'm totally justified in acting inappropriately because you can't help it if you have a Condition amirite?", which sometimes results in chuckleheads trolling message boards and calling people "fags" during games of Counterstrike.

Neither has a known cure, but Assburgers can sometimes be mitigated with hard punches to the mouth.

Facebook and Mozilla apparently don't get along. I can't post status updates from my home computer. If I click on the "What's on your mind?" box, it goes blank, changes size a little bit, and doesn't accept any input. If I type anything, the browser thinks I'm trying to do a find-in-page, because it doesn't recognize that box as an object that takes focus.

Why in the everloving fuck do so many sites insist on rolling their own text input widgets? They're inevitably slower than normal ones (Last.FM really took the cake here for a while, with a text widget that would make a network call for every letter typed just so it could display a little "376/500 characters" thing) and usually glitchy. The vanilla text boxes work fine! Use them!

The threads in the support forums indicate that this problem has been around for the last couple of months, and are full of people saying that they've gotten no response from tech support.

Wut.

Recently stumbled on a fun blog via jokermage: Good Math, Bad Math.

His posts on manual calculation are pretty interesting. That's stuff like finger math, abaci, and slide rules. The abacus is a surprisingly powerful instrument—did you know that you can calculate square roots using only an abacus? His posts about the slide rule show how clever the principle behind it is (who knew logarithms actually had a practical use?). BTW, from the comments I also found a cool little post by someone else about the Kane Dead Reckoning Computer, basically a circular slide rule specialized for use by pilots (it can be used to calculate things like fuel consumption, airspeed corrections, drift correction, unit conversions, wind/plane velocity problems, etc...not bad for what's basically just a couple of wheels!)

His posts on abaci, and one on number bases, have prompted me to give more thought to how my concultures work with math. I'm leaning towards giving one of my concultures a tridecimal (base-30) number system, and possibly playing with mixed-base systems.

He's a skeptic. The bad math part of his blog is devoted to debunking nonsense, with an emphasis on skewering the erroneous mathematical arguments used by shovelers of bullshit such as pseudo-physicists, numerologists, HIV deniers, and (animal_co should enjoy this) creationists and IDiots. His post "Messing With Big Numbers: Using Probability Badly", which explains the various ways that true believers mangle statistics to "support" their arguments, should be required reading for anyone who has to deal with these people.

He's also a computer scientist, with an (unhealthy) interest in pathological languages. One recent post describes ALPACA, a language for describing (IOW programming) cellular automata. ALPACA itself isn't pathological (it's actually quite straightforward and readable), and the post itself contains a very clear explanation of CAs. But one of the examples he gives is an imlementation of a Brainfuck variant as a cellular automaton written in ALPACA. Oy!

The "Deleting Online Predators Act" (H.R. 5319) would ban minors from any site that "allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users; and offers a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger."

My gaming group's current campaign has nearly reached its conclusion and is starting to wind down. Consequently, we've been talking about what our next game should be. We'd pretty much settled on a homebrew Star Wars D20.

But today I ran across this.

Hmm.

Don't you hate it when you download what you think is porn but it turns out to be a video of a classical concert with the wrong title instead?

Waiting For Godot: The Interactive Adventure. This could be the next Nanaca Crash.

Alive in Joburg

A documentary about the space alien refugees that landed in Johannesburg, South Africa. The locals are not too happy with their new neighbors.

A very clever bit of filmmaking that manages to incorporate some great sci-fi visuals into a mock documentary in a very believable way. From the director of the transforming Citroen showreel.